Guerrilla Games Cancelled an Unknown Project to Work on Horizon: Zero Dawn

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Guerrilla Games has been working on Killzone for a long time and after Killzone: Shadow Fall on PS4, we were expecting to see another major installment in the series. However, Guerrilla Games surprised us with a beautiful new open world game called Horizon: Zero Dawn.

In fact, there was another project in development, probably a new Killzone game, that was cancelled in favor of Horizon: Zero Dawn. It was the best decision the studio could have made and it is nice to see the publisher backing their decision.

Killzone games, although amazing, needed a break which couldn’t have come at a better time.

We started out with a smaller team to look into exploring what those concepts would mean if we were to develop them. At some point we took two forward, worked on those prototypes for like, half a year or so. And we did some testing with some external people from Sony that are not in our office, and internally as well, and it was kind of 50/50 at some points.

We actually put all the feedback that we got into an Excel sheet. And we had these two graphs: What excites you most and what do you think is the most risky one? The project that [stood] out on both charts was Horizon.

Working on the same project over and over can be tough for developers and their creative skills. Call of Duty is one example, we are seeing the series go downhill and right now the only way to protect it is to introduce another studio and give current devs a break.

Same would have happened with Killzone but thankfully, they decided to develop a new IP.